


Burning Bridges

by boxparade



Series: White Blank Page [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Gender Issues, Kid Fic, M/M, Past minor character death, Single Parents, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-23
Updated: 2013-10-23
Packaged: 2017-12-30 05:43:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1014822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boxparade/pseuds/boxparade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing Dean loves about Brandy—the thing he had loved about Lisa—is that once she decides something, it’s done. So when she says, in a quiet but sure voice over breakfast the first morning in their new home, “I’m a boy,” that’s it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burning Bridges

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: The opinions/reactions of the characters do not reflect those of the author.

The thing Dean loves about Brandy—the thing he had loved about Lisa—is that once she decides something, it’s done. She’s made her mind, she’s not changing it, and whatever it is is always, irrevocably the truth. It’s the kind of fierce honesty to oneself that Dean envies her. He would never want to change that about Brandy.

So when she says, in a quiet but sure voice over breakfast the first morning in their new home, “I’m a boy,” that’s it. There is no doubt, no argument, nothing. She means it. And no matter how Dean reacts, it’s not going to change. So excuse him for choosing to hurry up and accept it rather than waste precious time in denial.

Of course, it’s not that simple. It never is. There are about a hundred million questions vying for attention in his brain, but none of them are going to make Brandy feel any better right now. She’s looking at him with wide eyes, filled with fear, and her lower lip is set stubbornly, but it’s starting to waver.

He puts down his plastic spoon, pushing the rest of his cereal (in a paper bowl because fuck if he knows where the real bowls are) away from him. He sighs and rubs at his forehead. “Okay.”

She shoots off like a rocket before the word is even out of his mouth. “But I mean it! I’m not—”

“Hey, whoa, whoa, slow down, tiger!” She snaps her mouth closed and stares at him in confusion, like her brain is just registering what he said. “Haven’t we had that talk about choosing your battles?” Either way, he’s not going to start an argument with her about this. He doesn’t have the energy to battle with Braeden blood, right now.

She seems to settle a bit, shifting around in her seat nervously, looking at him with Lisa's same fierce determination. Dean knows he signed up for this, marrying Lisa, having a kid with her—he should've expected their kid would wind up as hard-headed as her parents. But it still comes as a bit of—not a surprise, but it's a little trying anyway. Dean's not getting off easy with this one.

"I said 'okay', didn't I?" He waits for her to respond, nodding quickly. "Does that sound like I'm arguing with you?" He waits again, and this time she takes a bit longer, but she eventually ducks her head and says "No." She sounds a little repentent, at least, which is more than Dean can say for literally every other time he's told her anything. Sometimes he swears she never outgrew the "no" phase.

"Okay, so work with me here, kiddo. I know I'm like a billion years old," Brandy smiles and rolls her eyes in agreement, and Dean swears the kid's got a little of Sam in her, "but I'm still learning. So I'm gonna ask some questions right now, and you're gonna think they're stupid, but you're gonna take pity on your poor Dad and tell me the answers anyway. Does that sound fair?"

She chews on her lip for a moment before nodding. Dean takes a breath.

"Are you sure?"

 _"Yes,"_ she says without hesitation, and okay, Dean expected that.

"How are you sure?"

She frowns, like she's honestly never thought about it. Dean's not trying to instill doubt here—he trusts her, trusts that she knows herself better than he knows her—but he still wants to make sure he knows as much as he can about what's going on in her head right now. A part of him—the part that's a little selfish—wants to think this is all just acting out in response to Lisa's death. Kids are weird, and they deal with grief in weird ways, and there's some part of him that still thinks this is all because of Lisa's death. If she hadn't died, none of this would've happened. Which is true for the move, at least. Dean never exactly thought about settling down in California until Lisa died and Indiana hurt too much.

"I don't know," Brandy says, tapping her fingers nervously on the table next to her bowl. Both of them have forgotten about their breakfast. "I just am."

Dean nods. He never thought he'd be getting any concrete proof for that, but he'd still asked just in case. Besides, the next one is the big one, anyway. "How long have you felt like this?"

She seems to get that Dean is weighting this answer differently, because she pauses to think. It's—he doesn't wanna think about it, really, but even with his time spent overseas, whenever he was at home he'd noticed...something. He never acknowledged it—kids are really transient, a lot of the time, as he learned when Brandy would cycle through future career options faster than she could run, which was _fast._ But Lisa had always been there to keep them on the straight and narrow, had always had very defined ideas about what is and what should never be. So any thoughts he might've had, any offhand comments Brandy might've made, he never thought anything more of them once Lisa gently prodded them both in the right direction.

He doesn't blame her, is the thing. He knows the kind of environment she grew up in, and the kind she'd found herself in while he was overseas and she was in military housing, surrounded by military wives and military kids and in the middle of a breeding ground for gender roles. But he also knows how easily parents can silence their children on certain matters. He could write the frickin book on denial and repression. So he's starting to wonder—or maybe he'd always wondered—what it is Lisa kept Brandy from saying. What Brandy learned wasn't okay to talk about.

"Brandy?" He prompts, quietly, when Brandy still hasn't said anything.

Brandy ducks her head and says softly, "Mom–" She stops.

"Just me and you here, squirt." Her eyes dip a little at that, and Dean bites the inside of his cheek against his own grief. "Mom will love you no matter what, even if she's gone." That'd been a hard concept for Dean to wrap his head around—the idea that maybe there was an afterlife—but it'd been the only way him and Brandy could've kept on. He'd done it for her, originally, thinking it'd be easier to think about Mom as away rather than gone, but somewhere along the way he'd wound up believing it himself.

"A...A really, really long time," she says, her eyes fixated on her soggy cereal. "Like forever and ever." She looks up then, brown eyes all watery and hopeful and scared, and Dean suppresses a sigh. Truth is, he'd...known. Somewhere, all along, even with the years he'd missed, he'd known.

When Brandy was five, shortly after he'd come back from his tour, she drenched herself in his cologne and Lisa had laughed and looked at Dean with meloncholy eyes and said "She missed you." That was the first time Dean had seen any of it. He's got no idea if anything happened before. Lisa had sent emails, of course—hundreds of emails, detailing their day-to-day lives, that Dean read in the middle of the night whenever he could find a decent internet connection and a couple minutes of downtime. But those had only ever been what Lisa wanted to tell him; her take on things.

He's still trying to get over feeling like a shit parent for missing so much of Brandy's life—just over two years, if you added up his tours—but he thinks it's this part that's bothering him the most. Because he'd seen things, after he'd come home, but who knows by then how much Lisa had taught Brandy about right and wrong, about gender, about who she should be and what she should like.

But they're here now. They're here, and Lisa's not, and he's in this all on his own so he's gotta do what's best for them. He can't keep living in Lisa's shadow, parenting how he thinks she would parent. He thinks—if Lisa really is up in some magical all-seeing cloud thing—that she'd get it. That he's never gonna last if he tries to emulate her in everything he does. It's not healthy, living with ghosts like that.

So he's gonna do this however he's gonna do this. Maybe now, now that he's here and he's got this chance, he can make up for all the time he missed. He can do this part right. He's got to, because like it or not, they're all each other's got now. He's gonna do right by Brandy. As much as he loved Lisa, and he'll always love her, he lives for Brandy now.

That's not a bad thing to live for.

"Okay, kiddo," he says easily, standing and collecting their gross, half-finished cereal bowls, the milk soaking through the thin cardboard walls of the bowl by now. He bends over and kisses the top of her head, tells her he loves her, and leaves it at that for now.

They've still got a lot to talk about—starting with how, exactly, Brandy wants to go about this thing—but for now, he thinks he'd be happy with figuring out which damn box he put the toilet paper in.


End file.
